When it comes to experiencing the glorious mastery that is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, PC users are in for a more interesting time than console users due to the fact that hardware limitations are much more of a dynamic variable.
Luckily, an official post on the Deus Ex game forums gives us some insight as to how we should go about tuning the various aspects of the PC options menu. If you would rather have a hands-on demonstration of that, YouTuber and PC Gaming enthusiast Totalbiscuit put out a video going over everything.
As you can imagine, the first thing they talk about right off the bat deals with Display and Resolution. What’s mentioned is the basic idea that choosing a higher resolution will bump up GPU power usage. But in addition to that, they go over anti-aliasing. If you choose to go with MSAA (2X, 4X, and 8X), your GPU will take a performance hit if your PC set-up isn’t capable of a huge amount of power. The alternative to MSAA is TAA, which is more performance balanced. These display options will only help with GPU concerns, and don’t apply to CPU related issues.
The Graphics menu is the main array of options to focus on when it comes to performance.
- Texture Quality: This alters texture resolution, which hits on the GPU memory. Too high of a setting causes stuttering and slow down.
- Texture Filtering: The higher this setting is gives “sharper textures at an angle,” and setting it at 4X is considered optimal.
- Shadow Quality: This changes the resolution shadows are rendering at. You get clearer shadows on high, block-like ones on low. Putting this setting at very high can hit your GPU pretty hard.
- Contact Hardening Shadows: This setting deals with how realistic shadows look when they move away from their source. If you don’t think that’s necessary, turn it off for better GPU performance.
- Temporal Anti-Aliasing: Toggle it off if you don’t care about aliasing reduction for a smoother image, it would help your GPU out.
- Motion Blur: Smooths out the camera and object motion. GPU is impacted by it.
- Depth of Field: Far away parts of the screen blur when out of focus. Again, this is a GPU related feature.
- Bloom: “Bright spots on the screen bleed out, adding to the illusion of bright light,” the description says. If you don’t care about that fancy effect, turn it off for better GPU performance.
- Volumetric Lighting: Adds volumetric lighting to smoke and fog effects. It hits on your GPU, and if you turn it to Ultra it has a significant impact on performance.
- Subsurface Scattering: When light hits a a game character’s skin, this effect comes into play. Slide the setting down to off in order to improve GPU performance.
- Cloth Physics: If you don’t care about the quality of cloth simulation, turn this off to help your CPU performance.
- Ambient Occlusion: This GPU performance related effect allows you to control the ambient occlusion algorithms.
- Tessellation: Smooths certain meshes in the game by tessellating them. This setting has an effect on both GPU and CPU performance.
- Parallax Occlusion Mapping: This adds more details to certain surfaces like brick walls and cobble stonestreets, turn it off for better GPU performance.
- Screenspace Reflections: When turned on, it calculates the dynamic reflections based on items visible within the screen. If you don’t care about ultra detailed reflections, slide this one off.
- Sharpen & Chromatic Aberration: These camera effects don’t have much of an impact on GPU performance.
- Level of Detail: This last setting is pretty big. It determines how detailed meshes are when they’re rendered, and determines the distance before they disappear from the screen. This hits both GPU and CPU performance.
If you want to read our Deus Ex: Mankind Divided review, we have it up here. The game is out today for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
